Once your idea has secured funding, your natural enthusiasm for your idea can finally shine—it’s time to generate buzz amongst the outside world. When you’re considering a marketing plan, you’ll need to think about your branding, steps you’ll take to foster public relations, conventions and conferences you might attend, and networking opportunities. It’s also the right place in the process to begin planning packaging and to start a website—get viral!

The best marketing is free marketing! In this episode, using Circuit Playground as an example, we will go behind the scenes on how we write a tutorial, possibly including a little Vine/Instagram action to demo the lights and sound and get people excited. We will run through our past tutorials and show how good ones can get picked up by popular blogs. The tutorials we’ll be doing for Circuit Playground will be based off of the most popular projects people have built, so we will spend some time looking at what videos are the most popular and which can help guide your plan!

Why are we doing this? It would be challenging to meet the demand we’re expecting with Circuit Playground orders, shipping, outreach and more – so we’re working with -the best- to get as many out there, to as many people as possible, and “showing our work” about the entire process. Special thanks to David, Jim, Dave, Brooks, Dawn, Jennifer, Paula, Kevin, Wayne and everyone at Digi-Key.

About Maker.io
Digi‐Key was started by a maker professional and has a long history of being a destination for entrepreneurial engineers. Maker.io is the first site to help those people take their ideas from concept to product.

Maker.io was created to help makers understand the phases that occur from concept through production. Digi-Key knows designers will have stumbling blocks throughout the phases, and the main objective of the site is to walk makers through the design-chain “Roadmap” that offers an aggregated community of tools, ideas, solutions, and information that properly meet the needs of the marketplace every step of the way.

By leveraging Digi-Key resources including design tools such as Scheme-it and PCBWeb, complete BOM management support, leading edge maker-friendly solutions from companies like Adafruit that are augmented with full line support from industry leaders and having the world’s largest available inventory for immediate shipment, Digi-Key truly is the best destination for the maker professional.

The availability of very low cost modular hardware tools combined with simple-to-use free software development environments has led to an explosion in the number of makers and developers. As a result, Maker.io is platform (Arduino, BeagleBone, Raspberry Pi, Photon…), post, and project based. Beyond the roadmap, maker professionals as community members can submit projects either publicly or privately. This collaborative and project-based approach will help designers better understand the phases along the map.

Maker.io is the perfect complement to digikey.com. Whether you are just starting out or are already down the design path, you are able to access pre-curated content, solutions and resources from industry professionals, as well as your peers, to help guide you through the phases. No matter where you are on your design roadmap, Maker.io can help you bring your product and dreams to market.

Adafruit is proud to partner with Digi-key and introduce Maker.io to all our customers and fans. This is our second installment of Adafruit’s video series Maker to Market, which will take you on the journey that was the creation of Circuit Playground, Adafruit’s all-in-one board — the perfect microcontroller for learning electronics.